“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
(I’m pretty sure he meant, if you have a garden other people look after and prune and water)
Category: Quotes
Quote of the Day
“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
– Sigmund Freud
Quote of the Day
“Are you a devil?”
“I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.”
– G.K. Chesterton
Quote of the Day
“The optimist without the pessimist builds spectacular skyscrapers that fall apart when the first woodpecker gives them a rap. The pessimist without the optimist may never conceive of the skyscraper in the first place.”
– Scott Brinker
Quote of the Day
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
– George R.R. Martin
Quote of the day
“Here and now, we are alive.”
– from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Quote of the Day
“He who seeks beauty will find it.”
– From Bill Cunningham, New York
Quote of the Day
I love The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, and the character of Woland, who is basically the Devil though never explicitly referred to so. I always liked this speech of his about the place of evil in the grand scheme of things, and the way it’s inseparable from good:
You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow? Shadows are thrown by people and things. There’s the shadow of my sword, for instance. But shadows are also cast by trees and living things. Do you want to strip the whole globe by removing every tree and every creature to satisfy your fantasy of a bare world?
Quote of the Day
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray is one of my favourite novels, and its last paragraph is one of my favourite conclusions to a book.
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
The very last sentence is memorable enough on its own, as it reminds the reader of the theatricality of the whole thing, but what sticks in my mind is how sad the ending actually is. That despite the fact that merely a few pages before we got our supposedly happy ending, complete with the dramatic last-minute dash and declaration of love from our heroine to the man who had hopelessly loved her for years. I love the BBC adaptation with Natasha Little as Becky Sharp (unlike the Reese Witherspoon version, it didn’t sugarcoat the fact that Becky is a horrible person), but I think it loses a lot by skipping over the sadness of the hero no longer caring for his most-cherished prize.
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